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Or you could stop being ignorant and jump down from the high horse. We do not know the details of the contracts and obligations NVIDIA operates under and how many NDAs they themselves are bound by, but there definitely are atleast a handful of those and therefore it would be downright illegal for NVIDIA to do that. At most they could hire some independent developer to work on Nouveau, someone who has no access to NVIDIA's internal docs, but how much would that benefit anyone?

AMD has people on the payroll to work on the open-source radeon driver, and these people do have access to internal docs. However, even if Nvidia would do the same - pay people to work on nouveau - it wouldn't help regarding their proprietary driver and dma-buf. On the other hand, nouveau already can use dma-buf and as such support Optimus, Nvidia's involvement not necessary for that.

But basically I agree with you, people should get off their high horse regarding Nvidia. Getting involved in open-source is not as simple as they seem to think it is. Look at AMD, despite having an open-source strategy, they still have their proprietary driver. And despite people being paid by AMD to work on radeon, it isn't any better than nouveau. Both of these drivers lack hardware video decode, are quite far behind in performance, and the biggest one, both lack proper power management.
Why does radeon lack power management? Code was written, but it didn't pass legal review. So yeah, open-sourcing graphics stuff not as easy as those on the high horse want it to be.

PS. I know Intel somehow manages, their open driver has both hardware decoding and proper power management. However, one comany doing it does not mean it should be easy for others to do the same. Like you say, we have no idea how many contracts and NDAs Nvidia and AMD are bound by.

Edited 2012-11-10 06:55 UTC